Defiant Nature

The vineyard is just finishing bloom, the flowers smelling like a mix of jasmine and honeysuckle. Pitifully, the perfume is fleeting, tamped down by an untimely rain that lingered much too long. The days of rain during bloom made nature seem defiant and cruel. Somehow the vines and I will persevere, pollinate, and set fruit. The sun appeared this week along with its much needed heat, waking the vineyard up from its stoicism that it has silently slipped into. I have joined the vines in a quiet resolve to get through this moment of uncertainty, having faith that the summer solstice will be the advent of hot sweltering days of sun. I am longing to sweat, to feel sunburn, to be thirsty.

When in flower the vines are dichotomous, being in both a vegetative state and a reproductive state. Their canes grow rapidly stretching skyward while at the same time the flowers pollinate and will soon be our wine.

The vineyard looks wild, swarming with our honeybees, poppies, sweet yellow and white clover blooming, black birds zooming in and out, and ospreys (our fish hawks) lighting on the end posts and eating the fish they carried in from the Long Island Sound.